Zenta Is The World's First Smart Bracelet For Your Emotions

Trending News: This Smart Bracelet Can Tell You How Stressed You Are

Why Is This Important?

Because we'll soon be able to know a helluva lot more about ourselves.

Long Story Short

A London-based startup claims it's ready to make the huge leap in wearable tech with a bracelet that can sense your emotions in addition to all the cool gadgets you might now expect from a wearable. And surprisingly, buying one won't break the bank.

Long Story

You're on a first date and a gentle buzz on your wrist is telling you that you're happy — maybe she's a keeper after all?

The next day, you're at a business social with your coworkers and you feel a sudden buzz on your wrist. That's your bracelet telling you this situation is stressing you out, so you should probably get outta there, because who needs that?

Incredibly, a smart bracelet with this futuristic technology will be ready for the public within the year and that's not all it can do.

Besides the fitness, activity and sleep tracking — stuff we've grown to expect from fitness trackers and smartwatches — Zenta, from London tech startup Vinaya, can play you your heartbeat in realtime on your smartphone and track your breath.

But the main feature of the Zenta bracelet is its ability to tell you how you're feeling at any given time. It does this by taking the big data (the stuff corporations have been scooping up on us for years), as well as new emotion-sensing technology, and it tells you about your daily habits. And similar to other artificial intelligence products, Zenta will get to know you better over time, giving you realtime stats that let you know things like how stressful your day was today, versus, say, last Thursday.

"What we’re doing [with Zenta] is profiling people very specifically and helping them to understand their own physiological responses to situations.

"The purpose of this [Zenta] is to collect data from all different aspects of your life. So not just your biometrics (heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, and blood oxygen levels) but also how many emails are you sending? Who to? How much time to you spend on social media? How many meetings do you have a day? Who are you spending your time with? [We] cross-reference all of those data points with your location, the weather, which emojis you use. Over time, it will build up a profile of you and your own emotional responses to situations."

According to Unsworth, this emotion-tracking technology has just become available within the last year, and Vinaya is not the only one eager to try it out.

“We were ready and waiting on the start line with the likes of Apple, and given our ability to be fast and nimble, we’ve managed to compete with them," she said to Forbes. "Zenta contains more advanced sensors than the Apple Watch, and aggregates the data in terms of emotions, rather than fitness.”

Honestly, seeing this product is giving me the chills. Beyond the fact that it'll be incredible to know such deeply personal details about yourself, and make life improvements as they come, it's pretty terrifying that a company has access to this information.

And that's not to say Vinaya is the one to be worried about here — the company pledged on its crowdfunding site to "employ sophisticated encryption algorithms across all communication layers to ensure the highest standard of data privacy." Companies have been grabbing this sort of info about us for years without us knowing (minus the emotional sensing), they just haven't been able to figure out how to make use of it, so excuse me for being worrisome about my privacy.

And now artificial intelligence is giving companies the ability to learn what to do with this big data. I'm just not so sure I want every advertiser to know exactly how their ad makes me feel.

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Finally, a wearable that doesn't just do what our smartphone can do already.

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The startup has raised over $3 million from big-name investors including Bebo cofounder Michael Birch and former Index Ventures investor Robin Klein.